


severed strings

by trash_rendar



Category: Final Fantasy IX
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-22 06:48:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20869955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_rendar/pseuds/trash_rendar
Summary: A chat between puppets, just before nightfall.





	severed strings

The bed is comfortable, even though it’s not one of his own – not the overstuffed feather bed he kept in the Desert Palace, nor the velvety, silk-sheeted king bed in his Treno manor. It’s distinctly lacking in the sort of luxury he’s accustomed to, but in its own simple, rustic way, it eases him back into the world of the living.

Kuja knows at once that he is in the village of the Black Mages. He recognizes the unique, cobbled-together architecture from his last visit, especially the steepled hut roof that he can’t help but stare at as his eyelids flutter languidly. There’s a feeling imbued into the woodwork here, something warm and soothing like the sun streaming through the quaint little window set into the wall, like the sound of songbirds warbling in the trees and wind whispering through the leaves outside – a feeling that warms and soothes him, too, despite the dull aches in his body and his soul.

He doesn’t know what to call this feeling. But he knows it’s not a feeling he deserves to have.

A floppy conical something is bobbing to and fro in the corner of his blurry vision. It takes all the strength he has just to turn his head; and even then, he has to squint to make out a worn mage’s hat perched on top of a canvas coat the color of sky, fiddling with something in the corner of the room.

“Zidane,” Kuja croaks, even though he’s not here.

“O-oh!” There’s a clattering sound and the clomping of boots, and then a face is by his side – a face that is not a face, blanketed in misty shadow and seeing by lamplight eyes. Kuja had been pleased by the sight of his faceless golems, once, believing the sight of their hollow and soulless eyes would strike an appropriate amount of fear in the Gaians before their end. He’d never considered that he might find something like innocence in those same eyes. “Y-you’re finally awake.”

Finally awake? Goodness, no – he’s been awake plenty of times before, groggy and confused and haunted by ghosts he hadn’t the strength to resist. Haunted by half-awake nightmares that made him afraid to even breathe lest they pounce, afraid to shut his eyes again lest they attack still. Haunted by a swarm of angry rats, mangy and blood-soaked and crawling all over and under his bedspread. Haunted by the elephant lady, her hoarse, booming laugh pounding against his eardrums and her wide, greedy smile gleaming like a knife in the moonlight. Haunted most of all by Garland – Garland, who just stands there in the dark, the orb in his hollow core throwing sickly, sputtering red light up into his waxy, corpselike face. Garland, staring with blank, emotionless eyes. Staring. Waiting. Judging.

…But the child needs to know none of this.

“Zidane,” Kuja groans, cursing the weakness of his voice.

“…He’s…” The prototype falters, knitting his fingers together and sitting on a little stool at the side of the bed. “We don’t know.”

“What…”

“We haven’t seen him yet. But he’s okay.” The child sounds more sure of this than Kuja has ever been sure of anything in his life: “He’s okay, and someday he’ll come back. I know he will. S-so… so don’t worry.”

Kuja worries anyway. “How…?”

The mage shakes his head. “Mikoto found you outside of town. We’re still not sure how you…” The epileptic death throes of the Iifa Tree spring eagerly to mind. “W-we think you might have used your magic.”

It would certainly explain why he was so totally exhausted. It would also explain why Zidane isn’t with them, frankly. Kuja’s first instinct has always been for self-preservation, even at his worst. Even with his hands closed around the throat of all existence.

Distantly, he recalls the prototype’s name – something not given, something it chose for itself. “Vivi.”

The mage hums when addressed. “Do you need anything? We have potions, a-and some ether… Water and bread, if you’re hungry…”

Such generosity, to share so willingly with the puppet who almost unmade them all! A pity, then, that Kuja understands himself and his deeds too well now to ever accept. He shakes his head to refuse – by which he manages a twitch of his chin.

“Oh,” Vivi says, and almost sounds disappointed. “…Are you sure? … You don’t look so well.”

Slowly, Kuja says, “You must _hate_ me.”

Big, lamp-yellow eyes blink, though not totally in confusion. “Huh?”

“Don’t be coy.” It hurts to say more than a handful of words than a time. “You know what I’ve done… to the world… to you…”

There’s an obvious, damning hesitation.

“You’d have been better off leaving me to perish,” Kuja continues, saying what he wishes he could say to Zidane. “Not… quartering me in your houses, feeding me off your plate – “

“We don’t hate you,” Vivi says.

Now that’s simply impossible.

“I mean… well.” Vivi stares down at his thumbs. “I don’t want to speak for everyone, but…_ I_ don’t hate you, at least. You did a lot of bad things, and… and you hurt a lot of people.” The plight of his people is obviously weighing heavy on his mind – a plight he’s shared with his creator all this time, and neither knew. Kuja would laugh, if it didn’t hurt to breathe. “But… you did save us, in Memoria.”

“_One_ good deed,” Kuja scoffs. “A droplet of good… in an ocean of blood.”

“It’s not a lot,” Vivi agrees. “And it doesn’t make up for all of what you’ve done. …I don’t think anything can.”

The mage’s candor is secretly appreciated. Outwardly, though, Kuja’s face remains still and ashen.

“But Mikoto likes you,” Vivi brightens. “Because you showed the genomes they didn’t have to exist just for the purpose they were created for. And Zidane… Zidane trusts you.”

“I imagine… it’s not me he trusted… as much as Garland.”

He pictures the horrible old automaton now – what pleasure it would give Terra’s caretaker, to see his Angel of Death broken and bedridden, drawing breaths that rattle shrilly in his lungs, each one pulling him closer to the end!

“Nothing has changed, anyway… My time is still short.”

Vivi’s hat hides his eyes very well, when the little mage doesn’t want them to be seen. “So is mine,” he murmurs from under its brim.

Ah. Yes. Perhaps bemoaning one’s limited lifespan to a Black Mage was not the most _tactful_ thing to do.

(But then, what else did Kuja expect of himself, really? Even in conversation, he is cruel. It’s simply his nature.)

The prototype considers one of his gloved hands. The leather of the joints is worn from constant use, but the fingers, Kuja notices, are moving stiffly. “I’ve been… slowing down lately,” the mage explains. “Only a little bit at a time. Sometimes it’s my hands, sometimes it’s my legs… sometimes I just… have trouble thinking. Usually it goes away after a while, but… it comes back, eventually.”

Suddenly, too suddenly for Kuja’s tastes, the fingers go limp, curling numbly. He watches in silence as Vivi sets his hand beside his on the bedspread.

“See?” The mage shrugs helplessly. “It doesn’t hurt, it’s just…”

“Stopped,” the genome supplies.

He doesn’t mean to bring up the Black Mages’ innuendo for death, but it hangs thickly in the room anyway. A strange, childish way to cope with the end of existence – but then, they _are_ children, aren’t they? And Kuja supposes they won’t have much of a chance to be anything else.

He recalls the rush of glee that came with deceiving them all the way to Mount Gulug, and grimaces.

Vivi stares out the window, consumed with thoughts of his people. “It must be close to our time,” he says, maddeningly calmly. “I-if I’m beginning to slow down, then… Then the other models must not have long, either.” He sighs, ruminating. “Maybe not, though. Maybe we’ll live til the fall, long enough to see the leaves change. I think they’d like that. Bobby Corwen would, too, and the other genomes.”

Something in Kuja’s chest pulls uncomfortably, thinking of the little hill in the corner of the forest covered in scarecrows. His gaze falls to the bedspread, where his own limp, bandaged rests next to Vivi’s.

How long do puppets keep dancing, anyway, with their strings cut and no one around to mend them?

Maybe if he looks hard enough, he’ll find his own string - the one Garland fastened to his wrist, all tangled and frayed, pooled next to the one he fastened around Vivi’s.

“Thinking about it makes me sad,” Vivi continues. “But it doesn’t scare me anymore. Because today… Today, we’re alive. And as long as we can, we have to help each other and live life to the fullest. That’s what Zidane taught me. …That’s… what he was doing when he went back to the Iifa Tree.”

“When he went back for me,” Kuja whispers.

“Yeah. …Does… does that make sense?”

“No,” he admits – the sheer illogic of it far outweighs any silly notions of altruism, a virtue he still doesn’t fully comprehend. “I still don’t understand. …Don’t expect that I ever will.”

“I-I think you do,” Vivi insists. “Maybe deep down. Or... Or you wouldn’t have saved us at all, would you?”

The Angel of Death frowns, turning his head away. He has no answer.

The room is darker, now, somehow. Birdsong has left the forest; crickets are beginning to chirp.

“I thought it was morning,” Kuja says, urgently.

“Nope,” Vivi says, with a shake of his head. “I-it was already a little bit before sundown when I came to check on you, actually.”

The genome is tense, suddenly – memories of phantom vermin and ghostly smiles and hollow, dead eyes leering at him out of the dark set his heart racing. “A pity,” he says, raggedly. “To have wasted the day, I mean.”

“Don’t worry about it. Mr. 288 says you need plenty of rest, anyway. A-and it’s still only March, so... Summer's coming.”

Oh, the irony! Wasn’t parting sorrow enough? And now to compound it, with gentle reassurances and affirmations and thrice-damned _forgiveness_—!

It’s to laugh. And Kuja does, bitterly.

Vivi cocks his head. “W-what’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s funny. I – I guess I’m just…” Kuja sighs. “I’m afraid.”

The night is already black. Vivi leans somewhere past his bedside to light a candle, then returns, eyes full of kindness.

“There’s nothing to be scared of, Kuja,” he says, gentle as a lamb. He lifts the stiff, numb hand by Kuja's side and works its fingers between the genome’s own. “I-I’ll be right here if you need me. And whatever happens tonight, we’ll face it together, okay?”

Clasping Vivi’s hand in his own gives Kuja the courage to finally close his eyes. “Okay. …Thank you, Vivi.”

“Sleep tight, Kuja.”


End file.
